Jenna Starborn (24 page)

“Yes, yes, of course you,” he said impatiently. “Come! We have no time to waste.”

“But, Everett!” Bianca Ingersoll cried, running down the last few steps and placing her hand upon his arm. “What is the matter? Are the fields down? Are we in danger?”

“No danger,” he said briefly. “But there is a problem, and I need a technician's help. Jenna must come with me now. I am sorry to be so harsh, but the situation is grave.”

I had, with these few words, recovered my equanimity. “I am ready, sir,” I said, crossing the foyer to stand at his side. “Let us go.”

In seconds we were out in the strange night air of Thorrastone Park. Under the protected forcefield, there was no great change of temperature, and the well-placed lights made a valiant attempt to push back the utter blackness, so it should not have been particularly eerie and unsettling to be abroad in the late-night hours. And yet, it was. What few stars were visible seemed sinister and random, and even they were obliterated from time to time by great washes of light caused by intermittent solar flares. There was something menacing about the austere night skies of Fieldstar—some cosmic reminder of how small and isolated and unnatural this planet was, forced by the will of man to produce what men wanted—and biding its time till an hour dark enough, cold enough, remote enough, to revert to its indigenous state.

I tried not to think about it. Instead, I hopped nimbly into the vehicle upon which Mr. Ravenbeck had arrived. It was not his Vandeventer or even the sturdy little hovercraft that Mrs. Farraday used to tour the grounds. Instead it was, I presumed, one of the mining cars, a bulletshaped unadorned cartridge of metal with two uncomfortable seats and no enclosed top. No airborne capabilities, either, for as we went forward at an alarming pace, I realized we were bumping and jostling over the ruts and rocks of the ground on actual tires.

“What is the situation?” I called out over the noise of the unfiltered motor. Shaken by the rough ride, my voice seemed to tremble, though I was at this time quite calm.

“I will explain when we arrive,” he said.

“Has someone been hurt?”

“Yes.”

“Badly?”

“It is too soon to tell.”

Hurt by what agent?
would have been my next question had he seemed disposed to answer inquiries; but clearly I would learn nothing till we arrived at our destination. I clung to the door of the vehicle and maintained my silence.

In a few minutes we pulled up in front of a small bungalow built of the same indeterminate gray brick that had been used to construct most of the other buildings in the mining compound. I would have thought, simply by its location, that it had been intended as the housing unit for the mine supervisor or some other person of authority—though, indeed, I had no idea how the personnel were lodged in this quarter of Thorrastone Park. The lot of them might sleep in underground barracks, for all I knew.

I had my hand on the door, ready to exit at once, when Mr. Ravenbeck turned to look at me. “Jenna,” he said in a very sober voice.

“Sir?”

“What you see tonight—you are not to talk of to anyone. Not to Janet Ayerson, not to Mrs. Farraday. No one. Do you understand?”

“I am able to keep my own counsel, sir, and I am not one to spread gossip.”

He gave the smallest smile. “I know. I have been so fortunate to find you—” He stopped abruptly, as if there was more to that sentence. Then without another word, he thrust open his side door and leaped from the car. I followed more slowly. At the front of the building, he was bending over an electronic keypad inlaid on the sturdy metal door. The code seemed long and complicated; he certainly did not want unexpected intruders breaking into this facility.

We stepped inside a wide, half lit room that under normal circumstances would have seemed comfortable—its furnishings were quiet and well-made, its proportions were pleasing, its green and blue colors were easy on the eyes. But tonight it was anything but welcoming. Two of the chairs were overturned, crockery had been broken and scattered across the woven rug, and a man lay, bleeding and moaning, on the pretty tapestried sofa.

While I stood at the doorway gaping, Mr. Ravenbeck crossed the floor in a few strides and knelt by the injured man. “Merrick! Can you hear me? Are you better?”

“Everett,” a faint voice whispered back. “I cannot breathe.”

“Don't be ridiculous, of course you can breathe,” was the brisk response. “If you could not, you would be dead by now. I have been gone a good fifteen minutes.”

“My throat—she has broken my windpipe—my God, she is so strong—”

“Your throat may be bruised. There is nothing I can do about that. What about your arm? Has the bleeding stopped?”

“I don't know, I can't—I can hardly feel it, it is pain but it is numbness too, like the nerves have failed—Oh, God, Everett, will I lose my arm? Will I lose my life?”

“You most certainly are not going to die, and if you lose a limb, well, there are very fine clinics on Brierly and Corbramb where you can get a replacement, you know. It is nothing to be so fretful about.”

I thought Mr. Ravenbeck spoke with great callousness to a man who was clearly in great distress and, perhaps, mortal danger. It occurred to me, however, that Mr. Ravenbeck was also blazingly, blindly furious with Mr. Merrick, and that some of his lack of sympathy sprang from that fact. I wondered what the poor man had done to deserve such wrath, and I took a step into the room. “Perhaps, the PhysiChamber back at the manor—” I began.

Mr. Ravenbeck did not even look at me. “No! On no account is he to go anywhere he might be seen. Which eliminates the PhysiChamber at the compound as well.”

“But he seems most dreadfully hurt, sir,” I pointed out.

“No more than he deserves for his stupidity,” Mr. Ravenbeck muttered. “I told him not to—” He stopped, and shook his head violently.

“No matter how stupid he has been, you cannot wish him to die here,” I said, coming closer. “We must get him some care.”

Mr. Ravenbeck nodded. “I have given him drugs that will ease his pain, and when they have taken effect, I will fly him to the spaceport. He has a small, private craft docked there which, no doubt, has its own medical systems. He will be fine once he is installed there.”

“If he survives the trip!”

“He will survive it.”

I knew a moment's flash of anger myself. “Why did you call me here, then, if it was not to help you administer to this poor injured man? Certainly it was not to accept my advice.”

“No—it was your expertise I wanted, not your opinion. This building is protected by the fields of the mining compound, but it has its own generator system on the next level down. Something went awry there, which is why the sirens sounded. I need you to check for any glitches in the system—make sure the inhabitants of this cabin are not in danger.”

“Inhabitants?” I said sharply, for I had seen no one except the unfortunate Mr. Merrick. “Who might they be?”

“Persons who will not trouble you,” he said tersely. “My job is to stabilize Merrick, then fly him to town. Yours is to study the systems below and make whatever repairs might be necessary. I will return for you as swiftly as I can, but I warn you, it will be a matter of hours. I want you to stay downstairs, no matter what noises might sound above you. Do you understand? Go below, and wait for me there, no matter what else you think you hear.”

“Mr. Ravenbeck, is someone else in this house in trouble?”

He hesitated a moment, as if contemplating a lie. “There is someone else in this house who is not fit company,” he said at last. “I swear to you on my life you are in no danger. The guards are in place, the locks are secured, no harm threatens you. But I am uneasy about the systems below, or I would not have dragged you out of your bed so late at night.”

I brushed this aside. “I am happy to render to you any service that I can. I am willing to do more, if more is required.”

He smiled so briefly I thought I might have imagined the faint lightening of his features. “Someday you may be called upon to redeem that promise,” he said. “For now, it is your professional skill I require.”

“Everett!” Mr. Merrick gasped from his couch. “I am dying! Do not leave me here!”

Mr. Ravenbeck glanced back at the injured man. “In a moment. Five more minutes and the drugs will take hold. Then you will feel much better, and I will take you away.” He looked back at me. “Can you find your way downstairs? I do not like to leave him.”

“I believe so. I will look for you when you return, no sooner.”

I turned to go, but he stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. “Do PanEquists believe in angels, Jenna?”

I smiled. “No, sir.”

“For you cannot be what you do not believe in. But
I
believe in angels, Jenna, and you most assuredly are one. Now go. Be good—and do not stir until I fetch you.”

I left the room and made my way to the hallway, where a series of three doors could be found. The first one I tried was a closet, but the second one led belowstairs, and a simple wall switch illuminated my way. In a few moments I was down in the small generator room, looking around to assess the situation.

At first glance, there was nothing amiss here—nothing so overt as the destruction that had been inflicted on the systems at the manor. But upon closer inspection, I found that a few crucial switches had been thrown—nothing to cause profound damage, but certainly enough to trigger the alarms. Since they were still in the alarm position, I concluded that an override had been engaged somewhere in the mining compound, and that none of my tasks here would be urgent. Nonetheless, I was here and charged with safety; best I should look around and see what else I could do to make the systems functional again.

I had not been long in investigating the layout when I heard Mr. Ravenbeck hauling Mr. Merrick from the room. At first I thought the sounds of his hearty swearing were drifting down the stairwell, but then I realized that an air vent of some kind was carrying noises from the ground-level floor to the basement. I could quite clearly catch Mr. Merrick's pants of pain and Mr. Ravenbeck's responsive oaths, as well as what sounded like heels being dragged across a hardboard floor. Then the door slammed, and I heard the faint beeping sound of the lock being reset. A few minutes later, the muffled roar of the motor, and then silence.

Back to my work. It seemed to me that this generator room was ill-maintained and rarely serviced, for the waste disposal system was flashing a steady “near-full” message and a few of the safety breakers had blown and not been replaced. Secondary systems had apparently selfactivated to keep the energy flow continuous, but there was no reason for me not to fix the breakers while I was there. I could also start the waste-disposal mechanism that would carry the radioactive byproducts into the underground storage units where the waste from the manor was also stored; it was a simple enough process, though it required a series of well-timed steps, and whoever was watching over this system seemed to have never found the time to perform the task.

Well, I had plenty of time. Hours and hours. I could clean the whole basement by hand with a bucket and a rag, if I wanted.

I had been absorbed in my work for perhaps an hour when I heard the first inexplicable noises from upstairs. There was a heavy thud, as if a sofa had been overturned, and then a series of frantic grunts and clicks and squeaks that came in such rapid, planned patterns that I almost believed they had to represent speech. Did Mr. Ravenbeck keep some kind of wild animal locked up here—something part bird, part ape, part native life-form? Was that what had slipped its leash, assaulted Mr. Merrick, and scrambled downstairs to toy with sophisticated machinery? No—that last supposition, at least, made no sense. The switches had been thrown with intent; their deployment had not been the random act of a savage mind. More likely would be the sort of havoc I had seen wreaked upon our systems in the manor basement, unthinking and undifferentiated violence.

The passionate, incomprehensible voice spoke again, its tone simultaneously so mad and so pleading that I began to feel the skin on my back wrinkle in horror. Softer, more muffled, another voice answered, and I could not tell if this individual spoke true words or responded in kind. My hands began to tremble; I had to stop a moment to compose myself. Another sudden
stomp,
as if the creature above were throwing a tantrum, and this time the other voice spoke more clearly.

“Enough, then. Quiet, you. You've already caused enough trouble for one night, don't you think?”

My arms, my face, my stomach prickled with unease. For that was a voice I knew. That was Gilda Parenon.

Whom was she watching, in this unused, ill-kept house on the fringes of the manor, and what kind of threat was posed to us all by her charge?

For a few moments I stood, tensely listening, almost refusing to breathe in order that I might hear more of the strange conversation transpiring above me, but there were no more sounds. My thoughts were racing. If the creature herself (Mr. Merrick had called her a “she”) had not flown downstairs to meddle with the machinery, had Gilda Parenon performed that task? How had the scenario gone? Perhaps Mr. Merrick had arrived unannounced on the doorstep—perhaps he, like Mr. Ravenbeck, had some emotional or financial stake in this beast upstairs—and he had let himself in without sufficient warning. And the animal had broken loose and attempted to brutalize him with so much ferocity that Gilda Parenon could not with her own strength save him. So she ran to the basement and flipped the switches that would cause the sirens to howl, hoping only to draw enough attention to receive aid. Yes, that seemed likely enough to me—if any of this could be called likely, if any of it could be
possible,
if I was not having some strange delusional dream of my own.